Released at the end of May, TBH: Task Bar Hero is the latest desktop companion idler to dominate Steam’s concurrent player charts. Its gameplay is pretty simple: players sit back and watch their tiny pixel heroes battle a bunch of foes and gather loot, all while confined to a small portion of their desktop’s taskbar. It’s currently ranked #3 on Steam’s concurrent users chart, just below Valve titans Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. But there’s something weird going on here: a large portion of its players might not even be real at all, and those who are real aren’t entirely in love with the game.
Some of them have even accused TBH’s player count of being dominated by bots farming rare items to sell on the game’s Steam marketplace. As pointed out by Polygon, the game has a notably low number of reviews for its player count—at the time of writing this, the game has around 487,000 concurrent players but only 4,072 reviews. Also, only 51 percent of those reviews are positive!
For a game that most players don’t seem to enjoy, its Steam marketplace is pretty packed with listings. The in-game wood resource is listed over 200,000 times. Most of the items listed are abundant items being sold for pennies each, but a few are rare weapons with listings currently topping $1,000. It seems like these bots might be critically misunderstanding Steam’s economy with these prices, though. One in-game bow currently has a single listing for a whopping $1,585.75. The highest price anyone has paid for this exact item? 22 bucks.
Bots or not, the game’s player count has been overloading servers (a problem confirmed by the devs in recent patch notes), which players have blamed for lag-related issues like rare items disappearing. Shortly after TBH’s launch, Valve also had to ask the devs to make an announcement to ask players to remove their items from Steam’s marketplace after the game’s high player count pushed “the load on Steam’s servers to its limit.”
TBH has anti-cheat software that’s apparently in place to prevent stuff like this from happening, but the software seems to be targeting the wrong players. Some have complained that the game has falsely flagged them as cheaters after they’ve launched other games while running TBH, causing their Steam profiles to be tainted by that dreaded red ban message. A few banned players have reported that the developers reversed their bans after appeals. The developers haven’t shared plans to fine-tune the game’s anti-cheat software, though, which has left other players concerned.
“I have an almost 18-year-old account that just received a false game ban from this stupid idle game and a permanent mark on my Steam profile as a cheater – forever,” one player, whose ban was later removed after an appeal, wrote. “This is a game that is a victim of its own success,” argued another. “The devs never accounted for the sheer volume of people who are either hungry for any opportunity to make a penny on the marketplace, or the people (bots) willing to push the game to its absolute limit.”
Steam has seen its fair share of bafflingly simple idle games topping its charts, including the unexpected hit Banana, which is literally just a picture of a banana, and Bongo Cat, which is still a hit despite being over a year old (and despite being based on a meme that’s way older). But those have both received positive reviews, so their player counts at least made some sense. TBH, on the other hand, has also spawned complaints regarding invasive data collection, poor communication with players, significant nerfs to drop rates…the list goes on and on. Sounds a little suspicious to me, TBH!
